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A Disappointing Continuation

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

"Not bad for a boy from Liverpool who arrived with 5 bob in his pocket" Liverpudlian spiv Paul Raymond (Coogan) becomes the world's most uptight and stodgy strip club owner/pornographer finding his way around British obscenity laws - among the most absurd and bizarre censorship regulations anywhere and makes a fortune many times over. Destined to be Britain's Hugh Hefner in every sense the Scouser does so in the most dry, laconic and business-like way possible.As depicted here Raymond (nee Geoffrey Quinn) was at one point very attached to projecting an image of a self-made businessman who cherished family and country. In his own mind there was no contradiction between that and the outsiders view of him as a libertine/smut peddler. With the demeanour of a middle-aged drip perhaps he really was more the former than the latter. But he rather comically resisted the classification 'pornographer'.The viewer can kid themselves that this real life figure was a flake or a creep. But the film captures Paul Raymond's normalcy in ways which don't conflict with the very human eccentricity on display that enabled him to live a lifestyle few could even imagine. It is not easy to illustrate the shocking things the man did without sacrificing that sense of human frailty which helps the audience relate to the character.It is with self-effacing wit and charm that he publishes porn, has dalliances with several strange women at a time and bonds with his daughter Debbie by sharing the same cocaine - a disgusting drug with a disgusting method of use that two generations of party people have deluded each other and themselves about.

As with almost all biopics, half the battle with LoL is having an interest (passing or otherwise) in the life and times of the subject, in this case Soho porn purveyor Paul Raymond. To be fair however, there are enough interesting performances to haul the less committed viewer through to the end. The turns by Imogen Poots as Raymond's daughter Debbie and Chris Addison as Men Only boss Tony Power stand out, and it is never difficult to watch Anna Friel, here playing Raymond's wife Jean. Coogan himself is at the centre of everything, however the story almost seems to take place around him, with many events happening to Raymond rather than being driven by him. There are plenty of British thesps to spot, with David Walliams being prominent among them, and the production design deserves high billing for the glorious memories of time and place that it evokes. An amusing diversion, but there are difficult moments, and it's not all fluff and smut, the 18 certificate is deserved for various reasons. In the end, the film is unlikely to live long in the memory.

Director Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan collaborated a decade ago on 24 Hour Party People – a look at Manchester's innovative music scene from the mid-1970s onward. It is considered by many, including myself, as a minor classic. So hopes were high as they united once more for this biopic about Britain's erstwhile soft-pornographer-in-chief, and ultimately the country's richest man, Paul Raymond.Sadly, they cannot re-create the magic in this hotch-potch of a film which seems to lack any kind of compass and is unsure of the statement it wishes to make.There is a total lack of irony as we follow Raymond's hedonistic and highly lucrative lifestyle, giving people what many of them clearly want and for which they are happy to pay large amounts of money.Steve Coogan as Paul Raymond frequently drifts far too close to his Alan Partridge persona throughout the film, and comparisons are almost invited as he shows Raymond impersonating Sean Connery to his friends.There are under-weighted cameos from the likes of Stephen Fry and Matt Lucas; David Walliams plays a lecherous vicar, apparently a good friend of Raymond, but we are given no idea as to how he arrived on the scene and without backstory he comes across as a superficial irrelevance.The soundtrack is impressive, especially the Bacharach and David numbers, and the film does succeed in evoking a sense of period. But these are not enough. The film is ultimately specious and unsatisfying.

Michael Winterbottom's The Look of Love is a comedy-drama that never needed to be funny. The film is above all else a tragedy about how a man's wealth and his real estate empire clouded his judgment in all of his relationships. He earned his wealth through establishing his Revue Bars in Soho, the West End of London during the late 1950s. These bars featured nude female models, who were allowed to move on stage, which was deemed illegal at the time.Raymond then established his Men's Only magazine, which was a pornographic publication. His rise in wealth and property through the 60s and 70s led for him to be titled by the mid-90s as "The King of Soho". Paul Raymond was declared in 1992 to be one of the richest men in Britain. He died in 2008 with a fortune that was said to be worth over six-hundred million dollars. This is the fourth film Winterbottom has made with Steve Coogan, after Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, The Trip and 24 Hour Party People. Coogan specialises in playing shallow, self-absorbed, stuffy characters. His performance as Raymond is familiar but extremely engaging and darkly funny. Accompanied by some hilariously silly innuendo-laden dialogue, he uses his voice to express the pompousness and artificialness of Raymond's self-made identity. He values his wealth and celebrity image over sustained relationships. One of the stories he repeats is that his apartment was designed by Ringo Starr. A tracking shot as he walks through the room shows the sustained but untouched and unfulfilled construct of his lifestyle. In the context of censorship laws, the incredibly frank and confronting stage shows have a historical resonance, which is further complimented by their utter ridiculousness. Some of Raymond's stage ideas, like combing Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun on stage with nude female models, are strange and hilarious. Yet Paul Raymond is also in many ways a terrible man. His wife Jean (Anna Friel) willingly lets him cheat on her and he relates to his daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots), not through ordinary parental wisdom, but the advice of a business partner. When she eats all of the cakes he buys for her, he tells her that they're not all for her but for the other girls so that she'll have friends. Similarly, when she cries about being cut from one his shows as a singer he doesn't reassure her about future but argues that he can't let the show keep bleeding money. What the screenplay from first time writer Matt Greenhalgh lacks is a deeper understanding of both the reactions and the immobility of the characters. The film is about Raymond's relationships with three different women and despite all of the ones that he sleeps with, works with and exploits, he understands none of them. Rather unintentionally, the film is like this too.The female characters contradict themselves in confusing ways. His first wife knows about his affairs but is still surprised and upset when he finally leaves her. His mistress Fiona (Tamsin Egerton) is no fool either. She writes for his magazine and models in his shows. She engages with him and other women in acts of threesomes but leaves him when he can't offer a normal life. The film is extremely alert to Raymond letting his own daughter fatally self-destruct through her cocaine addiction (he advises her to buy the good stuff) but at the end the film still makes an attempt to reach for our undeserving sympathy. The image of the supposedly talentless daughter singing beautifully over the end credits is also a confusing one. If the film was not told through such a rigid, episodic structure, treating the lives of characters like small vignettes (cancer, marriage and addiction), there would have been stronger ongoing threads of conflict and more time invested into understanding these characters. Some of them are truly sadder than funny.